


Where We End is Not the Way that We Had Planned

by verovex



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Drug Use to Cope, Ed Goes on a Trip, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Past Child Abuse, Pre-3x15 Scene, Religious Undertones, Season/Series 03, Violent Visual/Auditory Hallucinations, post-3x14, suicide ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-30 08:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19849471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verovex/pseuds/verovex
Summary: Tabitha laces Ed's pills with Red Queen, forcing Ed to travel down a trail of acknowledging his repressed feelings for his very dead best friend.





	Where We End is Not the Way that We Had Planned

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [this glorious song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss8t7a8n0U4), although for the longest time I was using [Gasoline](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRHNi3QfFlE) for inspiration. For reasons on why fic writer is a moron and reposting this, feel free to read my [endnotes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19796104#work_endnotes) on this other reposted fic.
> 
> **Please, please, please read the tags.**   
> 

* * *

There was a very temporary afterglow to watching Oswald sink to the bottom of the harbour. Ed felt like he was walking on air, cut short by the pit in his stomach, a sudden magnetic pull to the edge. Steadfast, watching the murky water move, wanting the assurance that he wouldn’t be compelled to follow suit, or was it the need to know Oswald wouldn’t come back?

It’s all very final, isn’t it?

In knowing someone couldn’t come back from this — it didn’t matter how Edward used to view Oswald as some transcendent being that could fight through hordes on wit alone– he couldn’t come back from this. It didn’t matter that Oswald had faced extinction before, and still managed to soar.

He wouldn’t (couldn’t) come back from this.

Still, Ed wonders, chest heaving from what must be the cold, not from the discomfort anxious tears brought, muddled with rain. He wonders for what seems like hours, if Oswald will drift up to the surface. Resolute. Seeking vengeance. Reborn. The captivating criminal that had crept up on Ed’s desk nearly two years prior in the form of a case file Ed had hoped would remain unsolved.

Ed had solved Oswald’s puzzle, hadn’t he? Caused the closure of a book he hadn’t realized he’d partake in completing. Had it really been so easy all along?

The best part is what comes next, a voice adds, from the confines of a room in Ed’s mind he hasn’t opened since the last time he killed someone who got too close.

Ed finds his way back to the car, after bidding goodbye to a body that would (logically) resurface. His mind jumps between plans for this new future tactfully, while passing empty ship containers, listening to the low tune of a ship horn leaving the docks around the corner.

As he climbs into the backseat of whatever car Butch recently acquired, nods when they ask him if Oswald’s dead, grimaces at Barbara’s exclamation of victory, Ed reminds himself that he doesn’t have a friend in the world.

Butch asks where Ed wanted to be dropped off, the mansion was his immediate reply. The look Barbara and Tabitha share does not go unnoticed but wasn’t worth commenting on. Surely, he could mourn for this, right?

_You’ve only mourned for loves lost_ , a voice reminds.

“It had been rhetorical,” Ed mutters back. The two in the front seat don’t hear it, but Barbara in the back seat has. Her lips twitch.

_Questions you don’t want answers to have always been the most enjoyable to answer._

Barbara slaps something against his chest, interrupting Ed from continuing to have a conversation with himself. He looks down at it, confused, the movement causing rainwater to leak from where it had been stored in the curve of his hat.

It’s a small metal tin, Ed furrows his brow, looking at her.

“You need them more than I do,” Barbara shrugs. “But, don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.”

No one knows what he did, truly. Barbara, Butch, and Tabitha know Oswald’s dead, but don’t know the circumstances. They all travelled to the pier together, the trio stayed in the car. Edward had said he wanted to go it alone.

They allowed him the privilege, had already done their job of leading the lamb to the slaughter, leaving Edward to gut him where he stood, comparable to getting rid of a dying animal.

* * *

He had needed help for a long time for the thoughts in his head. For a long while, Oswald had curbed the voice behind a wall, silenced it, or quietened it enough for Ed to remember what life was like without it. The pills make things quiet too.

The first time Ed sees him, he’s given a clearer certainty that Oswald is gone. Oswald’s hallucination has the characteristics of what Ed remembers: the snark and sass, things Ed can relish in when his senses aren’t overwhelmed with thoughts of seawater and the stench of garbage coming from Oswald’s not-really-there frame. Despite his relationship with his mind and knowing there are truths which hide behind locked doors, having an apparition of his dead best friend still causes an unsettling amount of stress on Ed’s already fractured reality.

Only the dead ones come to visit, after all.

Oswald only shows when he’s high, and there’s no point in deciphering that yet. It’s not a problem if he doesn’t want to fix it. Using the hallucination to handle his grief is a sullied comfort, an indulgence to help him forget what isn’t there.

Pill between his teeth, an instant placebo luxury knowing the accompanying sway would follow. Affix his movements, quell his nerves and fixations.

* * *

Edward doesn’t know when the need starts, or where it ends. He doesn’t know if he should attribute the effects to the drugs, or the lack of sleep. He doesn’t know if he’s wrought with guilt or weighed down by liberation. It can only be the latter.

There were always things that would escape Ed’s knowledge, it was a simple fact of life, but a simple fact would not satiate his thirst. A desperate need to understand why he ached more for Oswald than he had any other before. How Ed had yearned for his revenge, but his success had done nothing but force Ed to succumb to realize the value of belonging under Oswald’s umbrella. Not for what came with from being his employee, but what came after. Late nights in a massive empty mansion which only housed them, but still felt full of warmth and joy.

Now filled with a constant dreadful draft, despite all the windows being locked shut. There was a chill in Ed’s bones that couldn’t be cured by a fire, or the duvet on Oswald’s bed. The ones that still carried his scent, lulled a resentful Ed to sleep mid-day, or mid-night, whenever the time came when Ed was too mentally exhausted to open the tin.

The pills offered clarity by causing a blur. A sheen would envelop Ed’s world, makes the colours in the world less loud. Forces him awake but stills his heart, despite it sounding like a jackhammer against weak cartilage.

The days wane, bleeding from night into day, the curtains remain drawn, and Edward hasn’t had the patience to shower. There’s no concept of time passed, he doesn’t really care.

Curled up on the armchair, content with what silence could be offered in the living room, the sounds the old home makes are enough to remind him he’s lucid. Feels the shudder expand across his chest when he’s reminded of Oswald’s words, sharp and clear in his ear, pleading, _‘_ by doing this it will change you.’

Replying with, ‘I’ve killed before, Oswald.’ Seems so asinine now, knowing where he stands, wanting to see Oswald enter the front door, alive and well, irritated with whoever wronged him that day, making idle threats and propositioning Edward with plans he can giddily partake in.

Ed’s days aren’t the same, that he cannot change. The opportunity of time gave way for him to heal, even if the coping mechanisms were not the healthiest of available choices.

* * *

‘He would’ve given you the world if you asked.’ Kringle comments, picking at chipped nail polish. Her tailbone rests against the dresser opposite to the bed Ed’s still nestled in. ‘Why’d you have to go and kill him though?’

Every time she speaks, it’s as if he’s been caught in a lie. At an edge, desperately clinging onto the repercussions of an action that could purely be seen as a compulsion, the desire to bring an end to something he hadn’t fully understood.

Kringle sighs.

Edward doesn’t have the heart to acknowledge her as anything else. Miss Kringle is much too formal given the intimacy of their interactions now, the ones where she sets him in place for the thoughts he ignores in his head, still locked away, trapped under the rubble of all his misdeeds. She lets him know he’s not alone, even if it’s not the company he’d prefer.

She’s the calm before the storm. He’d gone so long without having her around at all, not since Isabella’s bathroom. She was back with a vengeance now, in her own way. Sometimes she bore marks on her neck from where Ed’s hands had been, sometimes her head wasn’t even on straight at all. Sometimes it looked like she was patched back together, held together by loose stitches.

Sometimes she had two sides to her face, but that had only happened once so far. Where there was a clear middle line drawn down her hairline, one side red, one side blonde. If Ed had been paying more attention, he would’ve caught how one side of her mouth was curved entirely different from the other.

She’d been quashed by the pill between his teeth before he could even register what it meant.

Now it was just Kringle, pre-pill. Asking him questions she didn’t need an answer to. He was blind, she was not. She was all teeth, pearly-whites bright under every light.

“He deserved it,” Ed finally answers, flinging an arm across his forehead, collapsing back against the massive pillows.

‘Because he loved you?’

“Because he killed you,” Ed’s arm twitches, not immediately catching his error. He was so tired.

‘You mean he killed a version of me,’ Kringle pauses for intended effect, _‘_ you killed me, Ed.’

“Right, for Isabella. He killed her. He deserved to be punished.”

‘Are you sure killing him wasn’t a substitution for punishment you wanted to deliver on yourself?’

Disparity in its grand design, she was ripping threads, straight along the seam of mouths sewn shut. Ed pried a pillow from underneath his head, flinging it in her direction. To which it flew through her, knocking off the glass antique on the dresser, shattering on the floor. “What do you know? You’re dead.”

‘Usually how it goes with those who get too close, isn’t it?’

* * *

He knows ghosts aren’t real. He draws all the curtains, fires the staff who tend to the house, gives Olga a year’s worth of salary while telling her that her services are no longer required.

She gives him a look, somewhere between: ‘I never liked you,’ and ‘I know what you did.’

Edward knows the staff were fond of Oswald, he’d been kind to the help, offered a place for those to stay who’d gone far too long without work, most of European descent, likely reminding him of his family.

Not to be confused with Oswald having any traits of empathy or selflessness, that would just go against any of Edward’s closest (flimsy at best) held beliefs.

The mansion creaks and it groans even with no life at all. Some days Ed still doesn’t make it out of bed. The shrill sound of the house phone echoes around the house, bounces off the walls that are due for a dusting, reaches Ed’s ears from his perch on Oswald’s bed. It rings and rings and rings until it doesn’t. He hears the faint sound of the voicemail playing Oswald’s curt, recorded greeting. It’s far enough away for Ed not to make it out, but it pains him all the same.

Hears the click of the machine as a voice perks up. Likely from City Hall, or the GCPD.

There’s an anxiety that comes with leaving the mansion. Leaving the refuge of comfort wasn’t ideal. There’s a new reality for Ed to muster through. He knows what face he needs to wear. The grieving employee who was worth so much more.

Not today’s task, Ed thinks. He falls back into the scrambled silk sheets, slithering up enough until he can reach the tin hiding underneath one of the pillows. He presses another pill between his lips, tries to remember how many he’s at so far that day.

He clenches his eyes shut, curls the familiar housecoat around him tighter, and waits.

There’s an invisible weight on the bed within seconds. Ed doesn’t need to open his eyes to know what’s there. An inescapable dream. A voice spreads warmth through him that shouldn’t be so necessary.

‘How much more of this are you willing to ignore?’

“What’s the point of acknowledging it now?”

* * *

The drug brings a relentless climb, hiking a peak with no end, a novelty that could be worn off with death’s end. There’s nothing fantastic about the circumstances, there’s nothing left to admire.

No phoenix risen from the ashes, stuck at a hollow emptiness that’s more telling than Ed is willing to decipher. The type of loneliness that fizzles as the pill does when he crushes it between his teeth, only accented when he’s down from the high, tumbling into a deep dark well where only decrepit things of the cockroach sort come out of.

* * *

“I’m–we’re...” Jim wags his thumb between him and Harvey, too busy pillaging an open drawer by the front door, shaking a very empty flask, and making a face to mark his contempt, “...here as a courtesy.”

“To ransack the Mayor’s belongings and tell me you’ve decided to cut your losses with the investigation?” Ed distractedly asks, snapping the flask from Harvey’s hands and placing it delicately back in the drawer, proceeding to slam it shut. Ed wants to comment on how he could’ve sworn Jim should be more preoccupied with handling his affairs with Lee’s recently departed.

“Well, yes, but—”

“Is this the part where you tell the victim’s family that although you’re dropping the search, it doesn’t mean you’ve given up?” Ed watches the hallucination of Oswald follow Harvey around like a moth to a flame, the sounds of dripping water on the hardwood following Harvey’s shuffle as he scrutinizes the paintings on the walls, flinches when Oswald does as Harvey manhandles one of them, voice lowering as he continues, “you’ll still try to explore every avenue, but can’t guarantee results? That Oswald will end up lost in the mound of cold cases stacked in storage?”

Ed makes three quick steps to Harvey, practically slapping Harvey’s arm down as his nails trace along a portrait of an older generation of Van Dahl’s. Harvey rolls his eyes, “got it good, don’t you Ed? The whole mansion to yourself, Penguin’s money at your disposal,” Harvey sneers, “makes me wonder.”

Edward’s _oh so bored_ , face cold and as emotionless as when they first arrived, coming down from the high, watching the smirk on Oswald’s face disappear as the rest of him does too. Ed feels his fingers twitch at his side, hovering next to where the tin case is in his pocket, watches as Harvey’s eyes catch the movement. “Makes you wonder what, Detective?”

“Just...” Harvey pauses, shaking his head, meandering towards the front door, shooting Jim a knowing look, then turns to face Ed, “makes me wonder, is all. It’s too bad y’know, I was really itching to find a body.”

Harvey leaves, leaving Edward to wonder if Harvey was eluding to Edward being the cause of Oswald’s disappearance, or to the chance of Oswald not being dead at all.

Jim shrugs, lips curving into a frown, giving Ed a look of pity. Always with the pity, Jimbo. Hand on the door frame as he makes a move to leave, “you should think about putting together a funeral, give the people a sense of finality. I’ll make sure I’m there.”

“How kind of you. You were never his friend, Jim,” Edward states, as bluntly as he can, feeling a ripple of irritation. “Oswald gave you more than you ever gave back.”

Jim lets out something that sounds like a chuckle, “doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

Edward wants nothing more than to stab him in the throat where he stands, and Edward dreams of how that would feel, still standing in the entranceway long after Jim leaves, faint sounds of Harvey’s car barrelling down the driveway.

Briefly considers what Oswald would think of such a feat, before closing the door on the impossibility of validation from a dead mentor.

* * *

The only time he makes it to City Hall is when a phone call doesn’t suffice. He granted his own leave of absence three weeks prior. Everyone has done a glorious job of staying out of his way, but he can’t ignore the whispers.

Ed eventually gets done with what he came for, signing off on urgent documents that would’ve taken a six-hour turnaround time to find a driver, when they needed it to be done in two.

The only struggle Ed has, is when he’s alone in one of the staff bathroom stalls, rolling a pill between his fingers. An intern bursts in, yammering on his phone about the state of city, sounds like he’s bartering with the press about how much he can get for an ‘inside scoop’ about it all falling apart, and how Oswald was a disaster to the city anyway. How the Chief of Staff doesn’t have his head fixed to his shoulders, and it may be true, but Ed waits until the individual is off the phone before he emerges. The terrified expression he gives Ed from being caught lessens when he thinks of a way he can still get out of this.

“Student loans to pay. You know, I didn’t really mean any of that.”

Ed doesn’t really care, at some point he snuck in the pill while he’d been listening to half a conversation unfold, and although he doesn’t remember entirely how the intern’s skull met the porcelain sink, or when their cheek had smashed the mirror, he does find a twitch of annoyance at the blood curling around the toe of his oxfords. He sends a text to a number Oswald had given him months ago.

For those hard to clean messes.

Ed barricades the door with his back to it, waiting. Oswald’s hallucination appears, ethereal as always.

‘Not your best work,’ he comments.

“I recently lost my teacher,” Ed replies.

‘I don’t recall you really needing one.’

* * *

Ed leaves lilies at Gertrud’s grave every second Tuesday. At least he thinks he does. It used to be an affair Oswald and Ed did together, ritualistically after his impromptu release from Arkham. He brings enough to spread between Gertrud’s grave and Elijah’s.

Crouching in the middle of both, it’s a poisoned connection. Parents that aren’t his own, one grave he defiled in a quest for revenge. Everything about this was tainted, sour, thick in his throat. He puts a finger to his forehead, to his chest, to his left shoulder, to his right. It’s lackadaisical at best, but he hasn’t asked for forgiveness in nearly a decade.

“Amen.”

* * *

“You’re dripping on the sheets,” Ed scolds, quickly resigned by his hands running along the fabric and realizing they’re not wet at all.

‘Would you really prefer if I was anywhere else?’

Ed needs something tangible, and this is as close as he’s going to get. As much as he aches for something real, a new muse, aim, goal, anything, just something to say goodbye, he hasn’t gone searching yet.

“No.”

‘Of course, I didn’t really need an answer to that,’ Oswald twirls his finger in the air, attempting to be condescending, but Ed feels a surge of delight at his theatrics. ‘After all, I see all of what you ignore, my dear friend.’

Ed fidgets, looks from the hallucination sitting on the bed but causing no visible wrinkle in the sheets. The proximity should cause some sort of discomfort in Ed, but all it does is make him continue to ache for the real thing. “Had there been any other choice?”

‘There had always been another choice,’ Oswald reaches forward, hand resting on Ed’s shoulder. No longer drenched with water, wearing what looks like Ed’s pyjamas from another time. Ed leans into the hand, even though it's weightless and feels like air. ‘You weren’t ready to accept the alternative.’

“Am I ready now?”

‘Not while you need something to fill the void of not having me alive.’

“Sometimes I wonder how things would have gone if I had never run into her.”

‘You would’ve just run into someone else.’

“I would’ve been on time.”

‘What good would that have done?’

“You could’ve told me how you felt.”

‘What good would that have done?’

“I could’ve, we could’ve,” Ed starts gesturing, hands flailing exaggeratedly at random spots around the room, never falling on an actual solid answer.

‘What good would that have done?’

He doesn’t have a proper reply. None of it was good. Rewritten endings that were bad according to Ed’s understanding of the roles he was meant to play, an upbringing where structure was written in stone, and faulty wiring was met with belts and dark rooms. How could he allow himself to yearn for something he was never allowed to hold? Ed falls back against the bed, hands coming up underneath the pillow, pulling it over his ears. It doesn’t drown anything out, the silence brings the sounds of waves of water crashing into the pier, of Oswald’s body hitting the surface.

He reflects on what it would mean if Oswald was still alive, a circumstance of challenge revived, or the one where Isabella was never a factor. Oswald brought unbridled, unparalleled rage to Ed, emotions he never thought were possible. Things were calm and calculative with everyone else, to some degree.

Ed wanted to set fire to the memories, spread gasoline over the wound that Oswald had torn into him. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, there should’ve been some relief to losing—killing Oswald.

All he felt was shame, shame for how he looked back on it now, and what that meant for what he harboured inside. Shame for allowing Oswald to betray him and not see it. Shame for thinking he had flown so close to the sun and only came back burned. Shame for allowing Oswald to get so close when he knew Ed was the bad luck charm no one needed or wanted.

Did Oswald understand how hard it would’ve been for him? Was it something Oswald catalogued like he did with the people around him, or had Ed been different?

‘I understood you, Ed.’

“I don’t,” Ed lets go of the pillow, turning on his side, stretching out his legs, as they slide through the hallucination sitting at the edge of the bed. “I don’t understand you. I don’t understand me.”

* * *

Oswald’s funeral is meant to be a large affair, only seems right. Ed has pills at the ready when he’s staring at the king-size bed from the armchair across the room. Realizes his tie is askew, an accurate representation of where his headspace is. Hears what sounds like knocking at the master bedroom door, someone calling him: ‘it’s time to go,’ but that’s not true is it? Sure, he hasn’t slept in days, but it was three in the morning all of ten minutes ago. Who was at the door?

The voice on the other side of the door confirms it’s indeed half-past eleven, and they were meant to be there half an hour ago. The clip comes off the container with ease, and it’s another pill between his teeth and he finds himself at the funeral home in a dizzying flurry of colour.

Realizes his clothes are pristine, whoever had been at the manor must have assisted. There’s no green in sight, but no matter. There is a large picture of Oswald on a mantle, another at his empty casket.

There are pictures Ed remembers were salvaged from Oswald’s apartment with his mother. There is a mugshot picture of him from a year prior, Ed’s eye twitches, but Barbara’s hand is on his shoulder, making some comment (mostly sarcastic) that it was a cute addition. She tells him she’s so surprised by how he’s managed to put together something so exclusively delightful, given his association with the dearly departed, and how he can’t even find the time to answer one of her calls.

Ed has no recollection of preparing any of it, finds himself at the podium anyway, the face of true grief, even manages a tear. He should be playing pretend, but none of it is. Has a sheet in hand, to tell the story of what Mayor Cobblepot meant to him before his passing, minus the details of betrayal, refraining from colourful stories about nefarious deeds, like murder, decapitation and burials with wine shared between only them, blood still fresh on their clothes.

Is it strange to give a eulogy when the hallucination of the dearly departed is standing right next to you? Ed closes his eyes mid-speech, shakes his head a little. To anyone else, he’s trying to center himself. To himself, he’s trying to shake it off.

‘No, don’t you dare shut me out now.’ The words on the page in Ed’s hand shift, reading: I killed Oswald Cobblepot. ‘What would they think of you then?’

“I just needed more time.” There are some whispers from the crowd, no doubt pitying the pitiful. Ed finds friendship does seem like a particularly minimalist explanation for what Oswald meant to him.

He slumps his shoulders forward, continues.

Everything is a small layer of what Ed had meant to Oswald, what Oswald meant to Ed, no one would ever understand. It almost felt like such an insignificant amount of time for what they’d experienced for one another, with each other. No one had seen Oswald how Ed had, no one had read Ed chapter to chapter as Oswald had.

Here, no one knew, none of them knew that when one of them couldn’t sleep, they’d end up laying in bed with one another, talking about which demons kept them up at night. No one knew how Oswald could soothe Ed’s woes by entering a room, without saying a word. Oswald was the light at sea, where Ed had been swimming for years, in an ocean of his own loneliness, only to realize someone else was bearing its waves alone too.

He wants to say this, wants to say that Oswald meant more to him than any of them could ever hope to feel in their sorry, miserable lives, and there’s a moment he nearly does, opens his mouth, hears the words dribble out.

But he’s woken with a start, covered in a cold sweat. Pillow drenched from where his face had been. The mansion he never left is dark from curtains drawn, lights turned off. His tie is still askew, his collections of pills despairingly light. The divide of real and not, beginning to seem incapable of being rewired.

* * *

Edward’s never expected this type of dependency, shrouded as a commitment to overcome hectic days. Barbara’s scolded him twice now, he hadn’t asked for her opinion. He’s running low, sends a text to Tabitha instead of Barbara, knowing he went through the last batch far too quick. Barbara doesn’t care for his well-being, just cares for his brain, and the waning power of a dead king.

Tabitha is far from impressed when she delivers a new tin, tossing it to Ed from the bottom of the steps leading up to the front door. Butch in the driver’s seat of the Ford just behind her.

“Neither of us are your drug dealers, Nygma.” Tabitha sneers, pointedly scrutinizing Ed’s choice of attire with a quick once over, “this is your last house call.”

That’s fine, Ed thinks. Fewer people at the house the better. It was easier that way. Easier to succumb to the presence of hallucinations without needing to acknowledge how it would look to visitors. Easier to think about next steps. Easier to think about—

‘Regrets,’ a voice chimes in. Kringle sitting at the bottom step. ‘Strange Tabitha would even come at all, don’t you think?’

‘She’s not particularly fond of you,’ she adds helpfully, now from the middle of the staircase.

‘Doesn’t something seem off to you, Ed?’ She finishes, transported to the top step, as Ed manoeuvres around her. Ed slides his fingers under the rim of his glasses, pressing them into the corners of his eyes.

He prided himself on being intelligent. He’d look back on this day, years in the future, and think if it hadn’t been enough that he’d developed a taste for drugs to satiate his need to see only one hallucination, there was the fact he took drugs from someone who would rather he was dead, too.

He watches the old Ford leave, swears he sees Oswald at the gate, the car drives through him anyway, hallucination turned into smoke. He wasn’t high this time, maybe he was just really hoping it was the real thing.

* * *

“Tabby, I know we don’t like the guy, but are you sure this was the best way to get revenge?” Butch asks, glancing at the closing mansion gates in his rear-view mirror. “There’s nobody up there to help him.”

“Isn’t that the point? You’ve wanted him dead longer than I have. I didn’t realize this would end up being such a sore spot for you,” Tabitha flicks open her cell phone, deleting the text from Ed.

“Besides, it might not kill him. I’ll let Babs decide if we should pay him a visit again.”

* * *

It’s different but it’s the same. Ed’s head is swimming, there’s a haze of colour to usually neutral tones in the home, there’s a metallic taste in Ed’s mouth. He knows it’s not blood because he’s physically stuck his fingers in his mouth multiple times to check.

Oswald’s back, as he usually is. This time he doesn’t talk right away, just lingers in Ed’s peripheral but shifts when Ed turns to find him. At first, Ed just thinks it’s a bad batch, but his blood pressure is through the roof. He feels simultaneously as if he’s overheating, and hypothermic, and that’s never happened before.

The effects aren’t immediate, but there’s definitely something wrong. Ed tries to steady himself against the kitchen table, but when he grabs for it, his hand misses. He ends up on the wooden floor.

Doesn’t realize it until the burning of his cheek infiltrates his senses. There’s only adrenaline pumping through him, but his body is content on the floor. Paralyzed.

Someone tuts, and Ed wonders if it’s Tabitha, come back to finish the job. Another dead animal. He’s in and out of consciousness now. Can’t make out who it is from their walk, or the way they don’t seem to take steps at all.

_I want to stand._

‘Was that so hard?’ The voice, which belonged to the tut, and belonged now to some horrid amalgamation of Kristen and Isabella, was almost enough for Ed to end up back on the floor. When he looks down he realizes his body is still there, and yet he knows where he’s standing too. Outside watching in. He clutches his chest, runs his hands across his body and up across his head. He was real here, but he was real down there too.

“What is happening?” Ed asks, trying not to dwell on Kringle’s red hair, Isabella’s blonde. Trying not to linger on Kringle’s patched up limbs, or the train tracks embedded across the half that was Isabella’s stomach.

‘Your release,’ Kringle replies.

It’s not enough of an answer, but the Kringle Mix turns, walking out of the living room, wordlessly commanding Ed to do the same. He follows. A train has managed to overtake the foyer, a steam locomotive similar to the one he used to enjoy playing with as a child.

The Kringle Mix appears to be every role, shouting an: ‘All Aboard!’ from where Ed assumes the conductor would be. He climbs aboard the only carriage, and the train takes off before he can even sit down. He finds himself ungracefully thrusted into the seat as the Kringle Mix (no longer deformed in the slightest, however still very much two people in one) bombards him with menus he doesn’t open, laying them onto the weathered wooden table.

‘Tea?’ They ask, Ed doesn’t answer since the tea has manifested in front of him before he can.

The Kringle Mix’s outfit is that of a stewardess, like the ones you find on airplanes, not trains.

“Aren’t you wearing the wrong uniform?”

The Kringle half sneers, the Isabella side smiles, ‘we don’t have much choice when it comes to what you conjure up.’

Ed doesn’t know how to answer. “Where are we going?”

‘Wherever you decide to take us.’ That wasn’t very helpful either. The Kringle Mix flicks open the menu on the table, points to ‘The Number One.’

It takes him an extra second to realize the Kringle Mix had somehow managed to disappear without a trace to lay on the train horn. It’s excruciatingly loud in his head.

The first stop seems to take them to where they already were, the mansion in all its glory. Ed gets out, follows the Kringle Mix in. Oswald is still lingering from a side-eye view, but still doesn’t appear anywhere else. There’s laughter from the foyer, one female, one male.

Isabella, (or perhaps Kristen, was there really a difference?) was standing with Ed, flaunting the diamond on her hand, outstretching it for Oswald to grimace at.

“Charming,” he says, avoiding any direct contact. “I suppose congratulations are in order.”

“Yes, especially because Eddie has a question to ask you.” Isabella nudges Ed.

Ed chuckles, “will you be my best man?”

The hurt that crosses Oswald’s features sits at the forefront of Ed’s pain. The foyer changes to the living room in a flash that has Ed trying to ground himself by clutching onto a nearby chair. Oswald is scowling, but there is no Isabella in sight.

“So, you’re leaving Gotham then?” Oswald asks. It doesn’t seem like it’s the first time they’ve discussed it. He taps the top of his cane impatiently.

“Yes, Isabella has picked up a job at a university in Portland.”

“What good does that do you?”

“We can settle down.”

“And then?”

“Start a family.”

Oswald laughs uproariously, Ed in this scenario shifts uncomfortably on the balls of his feet, the one watching does the same.

“Why is that funny?” Ed eventually asks.

“Because you have more to offer than what is on this path.”

“You don’t know me, Oswald.”

“I beg to differ.”

There’s another flash of colour, and Ed is on a grassy field, a park behind him. He notices the Kringle Mix has a music box in hand, although he can’t hear if it’s carrying a tune. Isabella is tending to the children while Ed sits on a picnic blanket, looking positively miserable.

He’s on the phone with someone, it doesn’t take him long to figure out who. “There’s someone else.” Pause. “Yes, I know it’s not the first.” Pause. “Or the second, or third, or fourth.” Pause. “Yes, the ninth time is not ideal for anyone. I don’t know what to say anymore.” Pause. “I can’t leave.” Pause. “I just can’t, there are children involved.” Pause. “I should’ve never left.” Pause. This Ed presses his fingers to his cheek. Real Ed does the same. “I miss you.”

‘Train’s leaving,’ Kringle Mix perks up as the there-Isabella approaches them. Dream Ed snaps his phone shut before she speaks. ‘Time to go, Ed. Number Two should be fun.’

He’d never thought of a future so abysmal with Isabella.

Would he always have been so unwanted?

Kringle Mix snaps her fingers, and they’re back on the train, that infuriating horn could wake a graveyard. Before Ed can touch his tea, the train screeches to a halt.

‘How’s your heart?’ Kringle Mix asks. Ed doesn’t immediately understand, in what regard? It’s still beating too fast, yet too slow at the same time. How is that possible? It can only be one or the other.

Kringle Mix points with a finger out the carriage door, and Ed escapes into a time much before, rather than later. His heart sinks. He’s back in a home he’d rather never see, his father looming over his mother.

“How did we end up with him for a son?” His father has managed to forego the more colourful words he usually uses. “This is your fault he’s the way he is.”

A younger version of Ed, older than ten, younger than thirteen steps between them, but the comedown of his father’s hand still lands against the side of his temple. Ed hears his father throwing the word worthless around as if it carries enough weight to undo a child. All Ed’s ever felt is worthless, only shown how to be under someone else’s wing, or taught who they should be. Hiding and riding on coattails that aren’t his own, under the shroud of his father’s backwards beliefs, or under Oswald’s wing. None of it had brought a worthy return. Solely emptiness.

“I can’t do this,” a young Ed says. Current Ed feels the same.

‘You are not a product of his beliefs, Ed. You pave your own way.’ Oswald in his ear.

“So, you are still here.”

‘I would’ve said the same if you had told me.’

“What good would that have done?” It sounds just as mocking as Ed intends.

‘I would’ve told you no father should have ever laid his hands on you the way he had. You deserved to be shown love, Ed.’

Everything is moving too fast, he can’t corral his thoughts the way he needs to. He hasn’t thought about his childhood for so long, or how it impacts him now.

Ed’s back on the train without moving.

‘Number Three is waiting,’ Kringle Mix turns the notch on the music box.

Bad things always come in threes.

‘What defines you, Ed?’ The Kringle mix asks suddenly, for no rhyme or reason, ‘who are you in the grand scheme of things but a fly on the wall in the past, and a shadow to a ghost in the present?’

The train takes off. Horn loud. Shrieking halt.

This time, the train lets Ed off at a set of stairs, waiting for him to descend before disappearing into nothing. The floor he steps off on is to a room that looks like the Mayor’s office. The door is bright from the inside, a silhouette at the window suggests the two inside are close.

‘Oh, for the love of—’ Kringle Mix shoves the door open when Ed continues to just stand there.

The two inside are more than close. Ed notes this version of Ed’s lips are on Oswald’s without any sign of hesitation, as if a song that’s been played hundreds of times. It feels like an electric current through his fingers. Despite the lack of true realism, Ed can feel the tender burn of Oswald leaning against him, the shiver down his spine at Oswald’s shift in aggressiveness, how it coils in his chest.

Heat on his cheeks.

Kringle Mix snaps her fingers, and they’re in a warehouse. Ed struggles with his footing. There’s a wheel on display, a group standing before a stage. A new Ed stands in green, explaining the rules of a game everyone clearly wants to play. Oswald stands at the back of the room, grin full of pride.

Snap. Ed helping Oswald with a task that has Jim Gordon trying to break down a club’s door. Snap. Oswald and Ed showing a child how to effectively stab someone. Snap. None of it makes sense. Snap. Yet, so much does at the same time. Ed feels warm as each image, sometimes played out, flits in front of him. Oswald gives him a key. They share drinks, laughter, talks. Assist, scheme, sleep. Ed feels complete, watching it all transpire, but it’s like he’s watching a movie through windowpanes.

“Stop!” Ed shouts. He doesn’t need the visuals anymore.

He’s on a new set of steps. Kringle Mix holds out her hand for Ed to take. He doesn’t. He watches as she moves down the stairs, nearly disappearing into the darkness at the bottom of them.

“I want that life,” Ed says, to the amalgamation of loves lost, to Oswald who has yet to enter his proper line of sight. It’s causing him a massive migraine, or perhaps that’s just the pill. “I understand now.”

‘Nice sentiment,’ the hallucination perks up, Ed turns to follow it, still can’t focus on him. ‘Still dead.’

Is there meant to be any sort of relief to this, because even if Ed is afforded the opportunity to see how things could’ve been, they can’t be now, and what makes this trip worth it? For him to go back to a world with a dead friend and an empty casket? Where smiles are used as tools to mask unhappiness until he can be alone again?

‘You can’t,’ Kringle starts, ‘won’t,’ Isabella corrects, ‘wake up from this,’ they both finish.

‘And doesn’t that sound just as nice?’ Oswald questions and Ed falters.

He wonders what it feels like to jump into the deep end of the pool, after wading for so long in the hallow end. Dive underneath and feel the release, something that would bring him closer to all three.

‘You could join me,’ Oswald is at his ear. Kringle Mix is at the bottom of the steps, submerged to their shins in still, pitch-black water. There seems to be nothing else to this. He’d gone down so many floors, he was done. Mission completed, goals unachieved, future unattainable.

Ed steps in. The water isn’t as warm as inviting as he wants it to be, it’s dark and frigid. On closer inspection Ed only sees blood, red and warm against the fabric clinging to his skin.

Ed wanted Oswald.

How many lashes was it for Ed’s thoughts? The ones his father used to say were sinful, before applying his own version of punishment befitting whatever religious entity suited the mood. His hands still burned, even without the leather to make them raw. Fifteen years later and still fresh.

The scars had left a permanent disfiguration. Ed clenches his hands closed, turns them away from view. Oswald had seen the marks once. Ed had seen the rage bubble, like it does with Oswald’s usual short-fuse, but the compassion he had for Ed blossomed stronger. He clutched Ed close that evening on the couch in the living room, closer than he ever had, or ever will. As if in an attempt to erase the wounds, those visible and not.

Ed doesn’t want to die, but he doesn’t want to live either. Not because life without Oswald was unbearable, this choice was his own. At the end of the day, everything was not the fault of anyone else, but what they ultimately chose to do with knowledge and pain. However, life had looked less ominous with Oswald. Now, the pills made life easier, but everything was still dark when they inevitably wore off.

How long was this game supposed to last? Performing the simple task of pushing the bedsheets off to get out of bed was growing more difficult every day. Was it cowardice to desire an end to something that served no purpose? Wouldn’t it suit everyone? There's only been disappointment.

His heartbeat was a crescendo.

‘There are a lot of things I regretted in my life, but you were never one of them,’ Oswald confirms what Ed had never asked.

Ed turns to find the voice, still nothing. The comment sounds like it could’ve been real, it doesn’t sound like it’s hidden in a dream, or lulled behind a haze. Sounds like a truth he could’ve heard from the real thing.

Ed’s gone through life knowing what it’s like to be a regret, at this point he ran on auto-pilot, wading through everyone’s personal disdain for him. Kristen’s regret, Isabella’s regret, Jim’s regret, Lee’s regret, his father’s regret, his mother’s scar.

He tips back against the cold stream of no longer stilled-water, until he’s floating above it. It feels heavy, not in the way normal water would, but something thicker. He remembers the colour. He lifts a hand above his face, diluted blood smears across his palm, droplets tickle his face.

Ed hears snippets of Oswald and Kringle Mix, muffled by how his ears bob in and out of the water.

His heart is still hammering in his chest, like a woodpecker trying to create an escape.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ed asks, although he can’t hear anything clearly.

Still, Oswald manages to make his voice heard, like headphones underwater. ‘I showed you how much I cared for you, how much I loved you, you just didn’t hear it.’

Ed submerges himself in the water, weighed down by hands that aren’t his own, and look an awful like the Kringle Mix. He sees the twitch of their smirk above water, but he has no fight left in him. This felt as if he was being burnt alive, suffocating, chest on fire. If he dared to take a breath, they’d go nowhere, trapped at the back of his throat. Trapped like he was in a house of memories, a home that wasn’t his own. And really, there’s nothing holding him down except for his own inhibitions, his own weakness which keeps him encumbered, shackled. Oswald had been his focus, pushed him out of bed in the morning, gave him inspiration when he’d all but lost hope in Arkham’s walls.

Now he was death and decay, Ed’s regret.

He feels how Oswald must have, drowning. A gaping hole from a wound of a different magnitude.

‘Time to go, Eddie.’

His body was giving up. He wanted to think about how that voice didn’t sound like any of three, but he was out of time.

* * *

“It was just a joke, Barbara,” Tabitha argues, with Barbara already on the move to the car, out of the loud, bustling Sirens.

She’s not laughing. “You know what Red Queen did to Jim. Is it a joke when Ed ends up dead? You think that doesn’t bring the wrong heat when people find it awfully suspicious that the Major and his Chief of Staff end up dead within the same month?”

“To be fair, he deserves it,” Tabitha continues, climbing into the front seat, Barbara at the wheel.

“I’m not saying he doesn’t, but the repercussions are far too severe for this one, sweets.”

“Where are we going?”

“To find Lee.”

Lee isn’t hard to entice, much too distracted with her own grief to really care for the reasons Barbara needed an antidote, wanted any excuse for it to leave her empty, inherited home.

“20 cc’s of haloperidol, it’s an antipsychotic,” Lee explains, pairing it with a syringe she hands Barbara.

“Are you sure it’s enough to shut off the ‘psychotic’ that was already there?” Tabitha uncrosses her arms, twisting the keyring on her finger.

Lee doesn’t answer, plops down on the couch with a whiskey glass in hand. Barbara’s inclined to stay.

* * *

“Nygma, for God's sake, wake up!” Smack.

“I think we were supposed to wait until he woke up on his own,” a deeper voice adds.

“I don’t care, we have better things to be doing.”

“Well, you didn’t need to save him,” a third voice says. None of them are Kringle, Isabella, or Oswald.

Ed stirs, and it’s far too bright in the mansion for it to be the mansion, but it is. He’s still on the floor, Barbara leaning over him, preparing to slap him again.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Butch states. Ed feels like that won’t be the last time he hears it.

Barbara releases a breath, getting up from the floor. “We get it, sugar daddy is dead and you’re mourning, but can we move on now?”

“Your pity party has grown old and tiresome,” Tabitha adds.

“So much so she wanted to kill you, clearly.” Barbara moves to stand next to her, sharing a look that said, ‘clearly also meant early.’

Ed doesn’t say anything, nods, slowly focusing. Too much information. Too little time. There’s a universal sigh from the three.

* * *

Being brought back from the brink didn’t lessen the desideratum for death and its devices. Especially now, when he fully understood the piece that was missing from the hole that had taken up space where his deck of cards was missing a king.

Ed shuts the power down to the mansion, hours after Barbara, Butch, and Tabitha leave. He listens to everything wind down. Catharsis, listening to how quiet everything could be. It can all still come to a standstill, which seems so strange and liberating at the same time, an impossibility amidst Gotham’s chaos – and the hurricane of Ed’s mind. He could hear his thoughts, but for once nothing was there. No taunting hallucinations around every corner. Just the enveloping darkness that met Ed in every room.

Soothing. Ed preferred the quiet. He doesn’t hear the water. He doesn’t hear anything. He pulls one leg in front of the other, the sound of pills in a fresh container hits his thigh. Barbara had said they were from her stash, that she was certain. Tried and tested, for added assurance. He wasn’t ready to let go just yet. He had to accomplish something, or what would any of this have been for? He didn’t want to leave the mansion, no doubt he’d return while preparing for the next steps. He was travelling unexplored terrain now, leaving behind the parts that weren’t marred by betrayal.

After all, he’d take his newfound self-awareness to the bottom of the harbour where he’d left it.


End file.
